david-s.net - David Schlosnagle's Words, Photos, and Links

The fine people over at TextDrive run ModSecurity on their Apache servers. ModSecurity takes care of filtering out most evil comment spammers requests before they even have a chance to actually hit the applications running on the server (i.e. WordPress). This is all great, unless of course your mom tries to make a comment and gets a HTTP 412 Error, The precondition given in one or more of the request-header fields evaluated to false when it was tested on the server.. The problem is that the referrer in this case has the evil word sex in it. Last I checked, sexagenarian wasn’t dirty (I don’t think Texas has banned it yet, but they might try to soon. Any word over 2 syllables matching the regex ".*$DEVIL_WORD.*" will be stricken from the dictionary). Thanks to An introduction to mod_security, I added the following to my .htaccess and all is well.

SecFilterSelective "HTTP_REFERER" "the-newest-member-of-the-sexagenarian-club" "allow"

Today marks the release of WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”, and I can say that I’ve successfully upgraded to the stable version. As I mentioned before, I’ve been running on the 1.5 beta for about a month, and everything seems to be working great. The new themes system and improved plugin API are wonderful. The comment spam protection in the core is much improved. Go checkout the bugtracker changelog and changelog on the wiki for more details.

Many thanks to Matt, Ryan, and all the others.

This is a public service announcement. For all of my family and friends that ask for technical help whenever your computer gets a virus, worm, spyware, adware, messed up IM, or anything else, I am asking you to please go and download Mozilla Firefox . This is as much for my sanity as it is for yours. Internet Explorer has a ton of software bugs, and when 95% of the world runs buggy software, some jackass is probably going to come along and take advantage of that fact. Whenever said person comes along and infests the web with the latest virus, everyone starts swearing up and down at their computer. Many times, IE is to blame for allowing

My other major reason for asking you to ditch Internet Explorer is because IE still doesn’t render PNG images correctly. If my site looks like the thumbnail to the left, you need to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox so you can see my site in all its blue xhtml/CSS glory! (Plus, I have a few little surprises that will only work in PNG and CSS compliant browsers like the Mozilla family, Safari, and Opera.)

Of course, the even better solution is to trade in your Windows PC for a Mac , and just use Safari or Camino

Update: Well, there’s another virus on the loose infecting web servers and then propagates to web surfers using Internet Explorer . Once again, if you’re unlucky enough to be using IE, get the fix now!

Update: There was another article in Saturday’s Washington Post that echoed my reasoning for the death of IE.